Day: December 31, 2005

“Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet… He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he would pay for university.

“The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100… (S)oon advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their own sites.

“So far they have bought up (977,500) pixels. Tew’s home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads. ‘All the money’s kind of sitting in a bank account,’ Tew told Reuters from his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. ‘I’ve treated myself to a car. I’ve only just passed my driving test so I’ve bought myself a little black mini.’

“‘I didn’t expect it to happen like that,’ Tew said. ‘To have the job offers and approaches from investors — the whole thing is kind of surreal. I’m still in a state of disbelief.'”